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Thursday 12th July 2007 6:31 pm
Katie Salen: Gamestar Mechanic Project FAQ Part 1
As Jim noted in his last post, over the next week members of the Gamestar Mechanic team will be sharing some of their thoughts on the motivations and ideas for the project, as well as some initial challenges and revelations that have emerged during the development process. In order not to leap too directly into the middle of things, here is a short FAQ that will help contextualize the posts to come:
Gamestar Mechanic FAQ Part 1
What is Gamestar Mechanic and who is it being designed for?
Gamestar Mechanic is a different kind of massively multiplayer online game experience. Players do not just take part in a game that was made for them. Instead, they create their own games to play and share, all within a larger MMO experience. The core audience is junior high school and high school students, a demographic proven to be captivated by online media creation.
What is the premise of the project?
Gamestar Mechanic began with a belief that the practice and production of game design enables a type of reflection in action that supports good learning. This approach has been mirrored over the years in the development of products like Mindstorms and open-source tools and programming languages like Logo, Squeak, Scratch, and Alice designed to teach procedural thinking, problem solving, and logic, by learning to program. Seymour Papert and Michel Resnick pioneered thinking about how the acquisition of a programming language empowers a person to model knowledge and to see the world as a system of interconnected parts. Gamestar Mechanic shares in this approach not by teaching the language of programming but the language of game design.
Why is an emphasis on design, rather than programming, important?
This distinction is quite important for several reasons. First, many excellent game-making software products exist already and have been used, in limited cases, by teachers in K-12 and university contexts. These tools include Game Maker, RPG Maker, Stagecast Creator, 3D Game Maker, Zillions of Games, Toontalk, Klik and Play, and Adventure Game Studio to name but a few, with many more products currently in development. These tools have a proven track record of facilitating game production and have opened up the context of game making to those who are not professional game designers. Yet while each of these tools enables game design, they don’t explicitly embed the practice or thinking of game design within the experience and often focuses on game programming as the primary pedagogy. Within these tools games emerge out of a set of programming procedures: make the ball bounce against a wall: Make a wall sprite and a ball sprite; manipulate the ball: Add Event > Event Selector > Mouse > Left button.
Gamestar Mechanic contrasts this approach by situating the making of games within a larger game world, where the making and modding of games is not only the primary play mechanic, or mode of interaction, but also the means by which game design thinking and practice are modeled and performed. Players take on the role of “mechanics,” brought into a steam-punk inspired world to repair and contribute games to the economy on which the now broken-down world runs. Every element in the world constitutes a game component, embodied as creatures, that can be used to design and repair games. Through a series of carefully scaffolded challenges, players are introduced to the rules governing the behaviors and relationships between creatures and earn the ability to access the creature DNA to modify basic parameters like speed, movement pattern, intelligence, health, loops, and conditionals (if this, then that). Players enter and play through the game from the point of view of design. So while they emerge from the experience understanding aspects of game programming, it is not the dominant paradigm.
Who is involved in the project?
The project involves a game design project team at Gamelab, who are designing the game, and an assessment team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who have been charged with developing strategies for understanding and evaluating the kind of learning taking place in the play of the game. The team includes:
Jim Gee, principal investigator, UMadison
Katie Salen, lead designer, Gamelab
Betty Hayes, assessment lead, UMadison
Greg Trefry, project manager, Gamelab
Alex Games, PhD researcher, UMadison
Robert Torres, PhD researcher, NYU
Eric Socolofsky, lead programmer, Gamelab
Kyron Ramsey, lead artist, Gamelab
Phil Weber, lead visual designer, Gamelab
Muon Van, programmer, Gamelab
Clint Beharry, web programmer, Gamelab
Amar Ibrahim, audio designer, Gamelab
Click here for a video produced by the University of Wisconsin Academic ADL Co-Lab about how games and simulations could help transform education.
Category: Ecology-of-Games
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